Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) Central Indiana

MENTOR brings you a second blog post from our series of highlighting the work of grantees from the Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration Project (MEDP) funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This innovative project, which began in FY 2012, was intended to test whether mentoring programs could make enhancements to their usual services that strengthened mentors’ ability to serve as advocates and take on more of an explicit teaching role with their mentees. The hope was that this approach might strengthen mentor-mentee relationships and lead to stronger outcomes for youth.

Now that the evaluation of the project is coming to a close, we wanted to highlight the unique and innovative approaches to teaching and advocacy developed by several of the funded organizations. These posts highlight their excellent work and can illustrate for other mentoring programs how they might approach program improvements and participate in research projects in the future. The National Mentoring Resource Center thanks each grantee for their contributions to the project and for sharing their reflections with us here.

To capture the experience of Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) Central Indiana, we decided to learn more about the project through an interview. Check out what they had to say below and feel free to leave a comment!

Utah State University / 4-H Mentoring

This blog post is part of a brief series MENTOR has put together highlighting the work of grantees of Mentoring Enhancement Demonstration Project (MEDP) funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This innovative project, which began in FY 2012, was intended to test whether mentoring programs could make enhancements to their usual services that strengthened mentors’ ability to serve as advocates and take on more of an explicit teaching role with their mentees. The hope was that this approach might strengthen mentor-mentee relationships and lead to stronger outcomes for youth.

Now that the evaluation of the project is coming to a close, we wanted to highlight the unique and innovative approaches to teaching and advocacy developed by several of the funded organizations. These posts highlight their excellent work and can illustrate for other mentoring programs how they might approach program improvements and participate in research projects in the future. The National Mentoring Resource Center thanks each grantee for their contributions to the project and for sharing their reflections with us here.

Below is one of many more blog posts to come detailing MEDP grantees wonderful contributions to the mentoring field.

The Garage Community and Youth Center has been a haven for middle and high school youth living near their two sites in Kennett Square and West Grove, Pennsylvania. Amongst diverse out of school time, programs like arts, community service activities, career coaching, and tutoring, their longstanding mentoring program was a cornerstone for the center. Operated by a tenured staff member with deep organizational knowledge, the program provided high quality mentoring experiences year over year to the Garage students.

While students were receiving high quality services, the Garage staff ran into a common problem. Executive Director Kristin Proto says, "When one person is running [the program], the process lives in that person's head. Doing this assessment can help bring that knowledge back to the organization. We can ask questions like, how does what we say we do translate into what happens on the ground? Is it working? Is what we put into place five years ago still relevant?"

As the fourth largest agency in one of the oldest and most respected brands in the youth mentoring business, one might wonder why Big Brothers Big Sisters Independence Region enthusiastically engaged in a thorough quality assessment of their practices called NQMS or the National Quality Mentoring System. CEO Marcus Allen puts it this way, "As an organization, we must always strive to be better – be better for the kids and families who depend on us, be better for the volunteers who spend nearly 80,000 hours annually to help create stronger communities, and be better for our stakeholders who expect the best from us. The context of mentoring is changing, and the context in which our youth are living their lives is changing. And we need to get out in front of those changes so that we can respond to them proactively."

OCTOBER 22, 2018BY: MIKE GARRINGER, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AND EVALUATION, MENTOR: THE NATIONAL MENTORING PARTNERSHIP

We are happy to officially launch the NMRC’s first podcast series, Reflections on Research, which offers interviews with leading researchers and scholars about their youth mentoring research and how practitioners can use that information to improve their work with volunteers and youth.

Here at the NMRC, we are very invested in applying more research to the work of programs around the country, but also recognize that busy practitioners can have a hard time tracking down research articles in often obscure journals or can struggle to find the time to read lengthy reports from major new studies. The new series of podcasts is designed to make it easier for those working in mentoring programs, as well as funders and policymakers, to hear directly from the research community and learn from leading scholars about exciting new findings and key innovations being tested in their studies.

This Web site is funded through a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse, this Web site including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided.